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May 01, 2015

Time Magazine and National Geographic both recently ran cover stories with a baby on the cover. The tagline reads: This baby could live to be 142 years old. So the question that immediately comes to mind is: Is this possible and can everyone age gracefully without chronic human diseases? And can we do it with today’s technology ?

To explore this question we first need to compare the mortality in 1900 versus today. In 1900, half of the deaths were caused by pneumonia, influenza, tuberculosis, gastrointestinal infections. These diseases were cured largely with antibiotics and antivirals after world war two. Cancer, diabetes, coronary heart disease, and Alzheimer’s were present but not near the rates we see today. Now, the top causes of death today, according to US statistics are heart disease, lung cancer, lung disease (asthma) , stroke, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and hypertension. An interesting question to ask would be: Do all these new, twenty first century diseases all have something in common, just like the top causes of death in 1900 where from bacterial or viral sources? A review of the medical literature shows two primary causes. In turns out that most chronic human diseases are 1) triggered by excess free radicals or oxidative stress and 2) are the result of a lack of essential minerals and trace minerals and cofactors in our diets.

Oxidative Stress

Free radicals or oxidative stress is the result of our cells metabolizing or breathing oxygen. Free radical are the “waste” products of life, and they are very destructive to cell membranes, proteins and DNA. Our body has a natural protective system-antioxidant enzymes that neutralize excess free radicals. If this delicate balance is disrupted, this then leads to an inflammation response in the body and eventually, chronic diseases could ensue. As we age, our natural antioxidant protective systems decline and we are told to supplement with natural botanical antioxidants, such as blueberries , green tea or cinnamon or antioxidant supplements such as Vitamin E or coenzyme Q10. But then we run into the “antioxidant paradox”. All these food antioxidants work great as antioxidants in a test tube in the lab, but in human clinical trials, the beneficial effects are either inconclusive or negative. This is because saliva and gut bacteria metabolise many these botanical antioxidants, before they have a chance to act beneficially.

Ukrainian scientists discovered the world’s highest antioxidant called Carbon 60 hydrated fullerenes, which is stable and inert and not metabolised by bacteria. Carbon 60, a natural product, was discovered in 1985 and a Nobel prize in Chemistry was awarded for this discovery in 1996. Scientists and doctors were calling it the panacea or silver bullet in medicine, but because it’s not naturally water soluble, just like diamonds, charcoal or activated charcoal, this frustrated scientists. Ukrainian scientist in Kharkiv the first to discovered how to dissolve Carbon 60 in water in 1994. After 20 years of preclinical, safety and clinical studies, Carbon 60 hydrated fullerenes were approved as a “dietary supplement” by the Ukrainian Ministry of Health and has been on the Ukrainian market since 2010. There is now a US patent pending. Scientists are now claiming that most chronic human diseases are triggered by excess free radicals. Just do a search on PUBMED with the key words “oxidative stress” and your own disease and you will find a link. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed ). Reduce excess free radicals and reduce your disease symptoms. A study at the University of Paris in 2010 showed that rats feed a diet supplemented with Carbon 60 in olive oil, increased the lifespan of rats by 90% from an average of 25-30 months to over 55 months.

Essential minerals and trace minerals.

The National Post ran a story on May 1- “Obese Canadians should be granted legal protection from discrimination, professor says.” The obesity debate is totally missing the point. Most Doctors are ignoring their own medical research. The cause of the 400% increase in obesity in last 3 decades in Canada and sharp rise in most other chronic human diseases since the 1930’ is due to a chronic lack of essential minerals and trace minerals in our diet (plants, fruits and vegetables) that are needed as co-factors in the body for our biochemical pathways to work efficiently.

The soil minerals concentrations have been dropping worldwide for the last 100 years, so less and less minerals are absorbed in fruits, vegetables and other plants. This is due primarily to the fact that we no longer cook and heat our homes with wood and throw away the ashes (95% minerals) back into the garden to replenish the soil with the 60 essential and trace minerals that our bodies need. Fertilizer only has 3 minerals. Even the nutritional supplements commonly found in most health food stores don't carry the full complement of 90 essential nutrients, which should include 60 essential minerals, 15 essential vitamins, 12 essential amino acids and 3 fatty acids and the right doses of each and the correct easily absorbable mineral salts.

How do we know that we need 90 essential nutrients? Just talk to any veterinarian. Vets have cured over 600 chronic human diseases in farm animals and in zoo animals by supplementing their food with nutritional pellets. When was the last time you saw a cow with arthritis and a pig with Alzheimer’s? Vets have to cure an animal after the first time otherwise beef would cost over $500 a pound or eggs $50 a dozen. Why? Because animals don’t have health insurance. Doctors are quite content to treat your disease symptoms for the rest of your life, billing health insurance and not curing your disease after a few visits. Human clinical studies in the past 40 years have shown that most chronic human diseases are also caused by essential mineral deficiencies and can be controlled with the proper essential and trace minerals. Diabetes has been controlled with the right amount of chromium and vanadium and other essential cofactors. Arthritis is a lack of proper calcium absorption and cofactors such as Vitamin D and magnesium. Greying hair is a copper deficiency in the diet.

So can we live to be 100 or over without chronic human diseases? Yes by reducing excess oxidative stress or free radicals in our body and ensuring that we get the right daily balance of 90 essential nutrients including 60 minerals and trace minerals.

If you would like more information on the above or a copy of my presentation on Aging Gracefully without Chronic Human Diseases that I gave at Ukrainian Canadian Social Services last week, send me an email wderzko@pathcom.com or call (416) 819-9667 or download it from this link http://bit.ly/1KzZvm8 For Ukrainian listeners, catch my Ukrainian radio interview on Radio KONTAKT archives from Saturday April 25, 2015 http://www.kontaktglobal.com/radio-saturday.html

This is not the first time government has sought to interfere with academic research to suit its own agenda, and sometimes they do so in more damaging ways than simply delaying publication. Last year, Edward Page, the London School of Economics professor of public policy, surveyed policy researchers, who gave dozens of examples of government pressing for “politically useful reports.”

Page found “sufficient evidence… to suggest that governments do lean on researchers” at the planning and reporting stages of research. While this interference does not appear to directly affect the overall conclusions reached, half of the respondents to Page’s survey agreed when asked if they were pressed to make "substantial… changes that affect the interpretation of your findings or the weight that you might give them." Where researchers bow to this pressure, we lose confidence in the reports as accurate, independent evaluations of policy.

Should this – and the agreement of the Sheffield alcohol researchers to “align our publication with the Government's response to the Alcohol Strategy” – alarm researchers investigating public policy? While Page himself says “If an academic says they can make the report less astringent in terms of some of the comments included, is that necessarily a bad thing? I don’t think so,” not everyone would share his laid-back attitude.

If government exerts pressure on researchers to produce convenient results, or to only publish when it suits them, it devalues the independent scrutiny upon which democracy relies. The pressure to alter reports before they’re published was presented by some academics in Page’s survey as a dialogue with government “to ensure [the reports] did not look bad”. But it would be far more appropriate for researchers to conduct their investigations independently, and to present their findings, and for any "dialogue" to happen transparently and in public, after the results are known. Anything less subverts the scientific process and undermines the analysis of whether a policy is effective.

Government operatives – whether civil servants, party figures or ministers – should tread carefully when delaying and interfering with the research process. If the independence of scientific advice and evaluation continues to be ignored, those of us who see evidence as a vital ingredient of effective public policy will need to be more vocal.

January 05, 2014

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

By Carol ClarkMemorizing facts and formulas may be the foundation of a good science education, but creativity also needs to be taught and encouraged in undergraduate classes, says Robert DeHaan, professor emeritus in Emory's School of Medicine.An editorial by DeHaan, entitled “Teaching Creative Science Thinking,” will appear in the journal Science on December 16. DeHaan’s career as a researcher of cell biology, a professor of medicine and a science advisor for educational studies spans five decades.“It’s unfortunate that we often teach science as if science only deals with neat problems with a single answer, and a single path to get to that answer,” DeHaan says. “But when you walk into a lab, you don’t know what problems you’re going to face, or how you’re going to arrive at solutions.” Creativity is the most complex and abstract of the higher-order cognitive skills, according to the classification system known as Bloom’s taxonomy of learning skills. Other higher-order thinking skills such as analysis, synthesis and abstraction are also key to solving ill-structured, or “messy,” problems in science, DeHaan says.And yet, he adds, a recent national sample of 77 undergraduate life science courses, taught by 50 different instructors, found that fewer than 1 percent of the items on tests and quizzes required students to use any of these higher-level skills.DeHaan advocates moving beyond just lecturing in science classes and getting students engaged in active learning modes that foster peer-to-peer reasoning and creative thinking for complex problem solving.“Students need to be reminded that there may be other ways to view a problem than the way it is presented,” DeHaan says. “And they need to learn to generate many ideas about possible solutions before beginning to evaluate which of them may be best.”Quick, how many uses can you think of for a plastic bottle? It's a simple way to test your creativity. Click here to see one of the most creative answers ever to this question, currently hanging on the Emory Quad.Creative science thinking should not only be taught, it should be tested, he adds. A simple method, based on the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking, is to ask students to list all of the possible uses for an object such as a plastic bottle.When DeHaan gives this problem to students, their lists range from four or five ideas to dozens. “Most of the ideas will be similar, but when you get a response that is limited to 5 percent or less in a group of 100 students, that’s an original idea,” he says.More research is needed, DeHaan says, to find effective strategies to prepare the next generation of scientists for the complex, interdisciplinary problems that they will need to tackle.“If more students learn to think like creative scientists, it will be worth the effort,” he concludes.

November 15, 2013

Whither the teakettle whistle

Work described in the journal 'Physics of Fluids' is a breakthrough in breakfast musings

IMAGE: Engineering researchers at England's University of Cambridge have studied the fluid dynamics of the steam teakettle and revealed a two-mechanism process of sound production. This breakthrough in breakfast musings can...

WASHINGTON D.C. Nov. 15, 2013 -- Despite decades of brewing tea in a whistling kettle, the source and mechanism of this siren sound of comfort has never been fully described scientifically. Acknowledging the vibrations made by the build-up of steam escaping through two metal spout plates is about as far as the explanation went -- and was good enough for most people.

But not for a team of engineering investigators at the University of Cambridge in England, who have at last illuminated the mystery. Through a series of experiments, the team has produced a breakthrough in breakfast musings with the world's first accurate model of the whistling mechanism inside the classic stovetop kettle. Their paper appears in the journal Physics of Fluids.

They have located the physical source of the teakettle whistle at the spout as steam flows up it, and identified a two-mechanism process of whistle production. Their results show that as the kettle starts to boil, the whistle behaves like a Helmholtz resonator -- the same mechanism that causes an empty bottle to hum when you blow over the neck. However, above a particular flow speed, the sound is instead produced by small vortices -- regions of swirling flow -- which, at certain frequencies, can produce noise.

The findings are potentially able to explain familiar problems of other wayward whistles, such as the annoying plumbing noises caused by air trapped in pipes or damaged car exhausts.

Hey, it's not as if people haven't been trying to figure this out for more than a century. In 1877, for example, John William Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, wrote the foundational text, The Theory Of Sound, and considered the problem. In 1909 the first U.S. patent for an "alarm device for culinary utensils" was filed, followed up regularly by similar patent claims for various valve and signaling devices. What they all missed is a level of detail the Cambridge study revealed -- the swirling vortices.

"Pipes inside a building are one classic example and similar effects are seen inside damaged vehicle exhaust systems," said Ross Henrywood, the study's lead author. "Once we know where the whistle is coming from, and what's making it happen, we can potentially get rid of it."

To interrogate kettle whistles, Henrywood, working with his academic supervisor, Anurag Agarwal, tested a series of simplified kettle whistles in an apparatus by forcing air through them at various speeds. The pair recorded the resulting sounds produced by rushing air, plotted the frequency and amplitude data of the sound, then analysed it to identify trends in the data. They also used a two-microphone technique to determine frequency inside the spout.

Vortex production starts as steam comes up the kettle's spout and meets a hole at the start of the whistle, which is much narrower than the spout itself. This contracts the flow of steam as it enters the whistle and creates a jet of steam passing through it. The steam jet is naturally unstable, like the jet of water from a garden hose that starts to break into droplets after it has travelled a certain distance. As a result, by the time it reaches the end of the whistle, the jet of steam is no longer a pure column, but slightly disturbed.

These instabilities cannot escape perfectly from the whistle. As they hit the second whistle wall, they form a small pressure pulse. This pulse causes the steam to form vortices as it exits the whistle, and it is these vortices that produce the siren sound that has conditioned millions of people to anticipate the coming of the tea.

Physics of Fluids is devoted to the publication of original theoretical, computational, and experimental contributions to the dynamics of gases, liquids, and complex or multiphase fluids. See: http://pof.aip.org

China has rocketed into second place in the number of articles published in international science magazines, according to a report released Monday by the Royal Society in London.

While the top 10 is filled with major Western powers, their share of research papers published is falling, while nations such as China, Brazil and India are growing

[....but what it doesn't show is that there is more to science excellence than just sheer publication volume. More significant then quanity is quality - the number of citations you get from a paper you publish..ie. how often you get quoted in other journals and recognised by your academic peers--Walter Derzko]

[as an aside...The map above shows citations in Chemistry by city. The green circles indicates frequent citations, red circles low citations and size of the circle indicates the number of publications.The west still obviously dominates. But the largest red circle on the map that is over Moscow, shows that Russians are publishing in chemistry but that they are largely ignored by the rest of the world. I'm told by Russian academic expats that the reasons for science mediocracy may vary-overemphasis on incremental vs breakthough science; falling back on me-too, copy-cat science; it could be due to lack of originality (everything is just copied or stolen) or the lack of young scientists that are as a rule more original then older ones or just plain political bias...most westerners don't read or speak Russian and the same goes for Physics .

As a proxy for future global competitiveness, it clearly shows that Russian science is "cooked" or "done like toast"...As one former Soviet scientist told me begrudgingly.." oddly, Kampala (Uganda) looks better, then most Russian science centers."

But that doesn't mean that you won't find any "jewels in the rough" though in former Soviet republics. You just have to look harder, below the rotting, collapsing infrastructure of science.

"We have found several "gems" in Ukraine.

In medicine, you have the discovery of Hydrated Fullerenes (or water soluble Buckyballs) or HyFN-C60 in Kharkiv, Ukraine (praised by Nobel prize winners who discovered fullerenes 25 years ago, as the "silver bullet" in medicine in the 21 century) . This fullerene-based water drink was just approved by the Ukrainian Ministry of Health, after extensive clinical trials, as the world's first nanotechnology-based health drink. It's classified as a food supplement and not a drug, because it's found in nature.

In Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine, you have the discovery of a new green drilling technology for shale gas, that obsolesces conventional fracking, which contaminates the water table with over 250 chemicals" --Walter Derzko.

February 20, 2010

Western school children don't realize that most of the basic math and science (chemistry and physics) found in science high school textbooks comes from Arabic (Middle East) scientists, discovered even before the dark ages in Europe. Scientists from the Middle East were once world leaders in most scientific inquiry and discovery. Today, the romantic and "almost backward wasteland" image from TV and Hollywood that most people have of a typical "middle east" country is one of sand, and caravans of camel transportation and not advanced science and technology. And this misperception isn't the worst of it.

While, the west is trying to further demonize the "Middle East" in all of the media, because of real and perceived terrorist threats, it's not an image that the Arabic world deserves, when it comes to science.

At this year's AAAS meetings in San Diego, we see an attempt to launch a S&T re-birth in a session called: "Re-emergence of Science, Technology and Education as Priorities in the Arab World".

The above graph shows the contribution of Middle East science to the world science community over the past 30 years.

Source: Science Metrix report called 30 Years in Science Secular Movements in Knowledge Creation. Countries with a Growth Index (GI) =1 are at the world average, so Israel (GI=0.94) (bottom of the curve in reddish-brown) and Iraq (GI=0.47) are falling behind the average world pace, while the rest (GI> 1.0) all grew faster then the world average. (ie Turkey with GI =5.47 or Iran with the best GI in the world of 11.07 or eleven times the world average.

On a whole the Middle East scientific output, while uneven across countries, grew four times faster than the average world level.

From a AAAS press release:

"Nanotechnology could aid the future of development of the Arab region," says Mohamed H.A. Hassan, executive director of TWAS, the academy of sciences for the developing world, and president of the AfricanAcademyof Sciences. Hassan made his remarks at a panel session, "Re-emergence of Science, Technology and Education as Priorities in the Arab World," taking place at the AAAS's annual meeting in San Diego.

"The Arab region, home to some 300 million people, faces a host of daunting development challenges," Hassan notes. "Three of the most fundamental involve ensuring adequate supplies of water, energy and food." Advances in nanotechnology, he says, "could help achieve progress by helping to address each of these challenges."

For example, he notes that nano-filters could enhance the efficiency of desalinization plants, helping to ensure adequate supplies of water in the region. Similarly, nanotechnology could improve the capacity of solar panels. More abundant supplies of water and energy, Hassan adds, "would boost irrigation and help increase agricultural output."

But none of this is likely to take place, he cautions, "without a strong commitment to training the next generation of scientists." The Arab region has some inherent demographic advantages when seeking to address human resource issues related to scientific capacity building. "Sixty percent of the population is less than 25 years old," he says.

"Yet, the region has some glaring weaknesses as well," he says. "Arab countries spend just 0.3% of their gross domestic product (GDP) on science and technology, compared to 1% in a growing number of developing countries and 2% to 3% in many developed countries. Scientists in the region publish less than 1% of the world's peer-reviewed scientific articles.

Hassan points to some encouraging recent signs, however.

"A growing number of countries have invested in high-profile projects designed to quickly build scientific capacity in critical areas of science and technology." He cites, for example, the opening of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) for post-graduate studies in Saudi Arabia and Qatar's Science and Technology Park (QSTP).

But much more will need to be done, he says. To boost science, he calls on each Arab country "to create at least one world-class university" and "build at least one world-class state-of-the-art science centre."Hassan also believes the national merit-based academies in the region should become more engaged in their societies and stronger advocates for science education and science-based development.

He readily acknowledges that "with so many immediate challenges facing the region, it's difficult for governments to engage in long-term strategies for development." But he says that "unless countries within the Arab region make a sustained effort to build scientific capacity, they will find themselves unable to overcome the 'knowledge-deficit' obstacles that have impeded economic development for far too long."

"Nanotechnology may not be the first thing that comes to mind in discussions dealing with strategies to address the Arab region's most pressing challenges," Hassan concludes. But such investments in science and technology could be a key to the region's future."

February 19, 2010

Want to know who will be economically stronger in the next decade or two? It will most likely be countries that have good emerging science and technology capabilities or what I call S&T bench strength.

Since it takes about a 5-15 or more years to take a scientific discovery and turn it into a commercial venture, we need to look at trends over several decades. Once upon a time, all you had to do was look to the US to find all the leading edge innovation in most industries. Not any more.

If we use the number of peer-reviewed academic scientific papers that are published annually as a proxy for S&T strength, then clearly the USA is still number one with about 250,000 -260,000 papers published per year. That's twice as much as China, who is in second spot with about 120,000 papers per year. Then we get a cluster of several nations at 50,000 to 60,000 paper such as Japan, the UK and Germany. The next cluster comes in a 30-35,000 paper range (ie France, Canada, India, Rep of Korea,historic FSU (ie Russia, Ukraine etc). Brazil rounds out the top ten at around 22,000 papers per year.

That list of academic titans correlates nicely with their relative economic strength.

But the gross numbers only tell half the story. If we look at growth rates over the last 30 years, we see a different picture.

Countries like US and Canada and even Europe as a whole, while high in gross total numbers have been fairly stagnant in growth over the past 30 years.

If we set the global average of the Growth Index (GI) at 1.0, then North America has a GI of 0.78 and Europe's GI is 0.95, less the 1.0 which is the global average.

Who are the S&T growth leaders in the past 30 years. You will be surprised. No it's no China.

Iran (GI = 14.4) (mostly nuclear research related)

Rep of Korea (GI= 9.8)

Turkey (GI=7.8)

Cyprus (GI=5.2)

Finally China (GI=5.1)

Oman (GI=4.8)

Portugal (GI=3.9)

Estonia (GI=3.4)

Tunisia (GI=3.2)

In contrast, the following are below world average growth.

Israel (GI=0.94)

UK (GI=0.86)

Canada (GI=0.82)

USA (GI = 0.77)

But then quantity may not always equate to quality (i.e frequency of science citations) and number of breakthroughs or milestone discoveries. A number of science watchers accuse China of doing alot of incremental copycat, me-to research.

There is also a distinct English language and western media bias to cover primarily western science and far less of a tendency to generally cover discoveries from around the world. So consequently, the politicians, business and the public doesn't have a clear view of the discoveries in other parts of the world, such as the Middle East or even countries from the former Soviet Union (FSU)

But in general, the moral of the story is: there's innovation and novel discovery all around the world and not just the USA any more.

January 01, 2010

Everyone likes to play soothsayer in the beginning of each new year, so here's my crack at predictions, black swans and wild-cards for 2010...but I genuinely hope that 1, 6, 7,8,9 & 10 don't happen...where is Merlin when you need him?

PREDICTION: Several distant earthquakes trigger "ring of fire" volcanoes to erupt & usher in a period of global cooling - decade long mini ice age

PREDICTION: Evidence of extra terrestrial life (viral/bacterial, prions, other?) confirmed on another planet or moon & /or artificial life created for the first time with synthetic biology on earth.

February 17, 2009

Recessions and depressions are great periods in history because paradoxes and contradictions seem to stand out even more. The big one facing society in the next two decades is the obvious economic one-everything in our conventional economic paradigm is based on annual, year-over-year growth, yet we appear to be entering a period of "peak resources" ranging from peak water, to peak oil, peak gas and most importantly for business, peak minerals-facts that the green eco-movement often ignores, or is hiding in the closet-the dirty green secret.

A story earlier this month in New Scientist, covered a Financial Times conference on energy and sustainability in London England and it concludes:

"Renewable energy needs to become a lot more renewable...[..]... Although scientists are agreed that we must cut carbon emissions from transport and electricity generation to prevent the globe's climate becoming hotter, and more unpredictable, the most advanced "renewable" technologies are too often based upon non-renewable resources, attendees heard.

Supratik Guha of IBM told the conference that sales of silicon solar cells are booming, with 2008 being the first year that the silicon wafers for solar cells outstripped those used for microelectronic devices. But although silicon is the most abundant element in the Earth's crust after oxygen, it makes relatively inefficient cells that struggle to compete with electricity generated from fossil fuels. And the most advanced solar-cell technologies rely on much rarer materials than silicon [-that being indium.]"

[..]...Peak Indium? 10 year of global supply left?

"The efficiency of solar cells is measured as a percentage of light energy they convert to electricity. Silicon solar cells finally reached 25% in late December. But multi-junction solar cells can achieve efficiencies greater than 40%.

Although touted as the future of solar power, those and most other multiple-junction cells owe their performance to the rare metal indium, which is far from abundant. There are fewer than 10 indium-containing minerals, and none present in significant deposits – in total the metal accounts for a paltry 0.25 parts per million of the Earth's crust.

Most of the rare and expensive element is used to manufacture LCD screens, an industry that has driven indium prices to $1000 per kilogram in recent years. Estimates that did not factor in an explosion in indium-containing solar panels reckon we have only a 10 year supply of it left.

If power from the Sun is to become a major source of electricity, solar panels would have to cover huge areas, making an alternative to indium essential."

Could we see resource wars, {which the US military has extensive plans for}, material rationing or outright prohibition like we saw with alcohol in the 1930's? Will we have to select between indium for our cell phones, flat screen TV's or solar cells? Will nanotech breakthroughs come to the rescue? -will an exotic combination of fullerenes, graphenes and carbon nanotubes be the substitution answer? The nanotech race for an alternative is on.--Walter Derzko

They also cover peak Platinum

"The dream of the hydrogen economy faces similar challenges, said Paul Adcock of UK firm Intelligent Energy. A cheap way to generate hydrogen has so far proved elusive. New approaches, such as using bacterial enzymes to "split" water, have a long way to go before they are commercially viable. So far, fuel cells are still the most effective way to turn the gas into electricity. But these mostly rely on expensive platinum to catalyse the reaction.

The trouble is, platinum makes indium appear super-abundant. It is present in the Earth's crust at just 0.003 parts per billion and is priced in $ per gram, not per kilogram. Estimates say that, if the 500 million vehicles in use today were fitted with fuel cells, all the world's platinum would be exhausted within 15 years. Unfortunately platinum-free fuel cells are still a long way from the test track. A nickel-catalysed fuel cell developed at Wuhan University, China, has a maximum output only around 10% of that a platinum catalyst can offer.

A new approach announced yesterday demonstrates that carbon nanotubes could be more effective, as well as cheaper, than platinum. But again it will be many years before platinum-free fuel cells become a commercial prospect."

Also , could Lithium shortages in 10-15 years impede future electric car deployment?

Let’s look at the metal gallium, which along with indium is used to make the next generation of semiconductor materials-indium gallium arsenide for a new generation of solar cells that promise to be up to twice as efficient as conventional designs. Reserves of both metals are disputed, but in a 2007 report Renï Kleijn, from LeidenUniversity in the Netherlands, concludes that current reserves "would not allow a substantial contribution of these cells" to the future supply of solar electricity. He estimates gallium and indium will probably contribute to less than 1 per cent of all future solar cells - a limitation imposed purely by a lack of raw material."

Other projections I've seen-antimony could run out in 10 years; Silver in 10 years, hafnium in 10-15 years and tribium by 2012 or 4-5 years. Looking for the next geopolitical flash point? The US imports 90% of its rare metals and materials from China.

(Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 103, p 1209), "Virgin stocks of several metals appear inadequate to sustain the modern 'developed world' quality of life for all of Earth's people under contemporary technology."

I've always wondered what minerals are hidden in the mountains of Afghanistan.... "It is widely acknowledged that one of the key motives for civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1998 and 2002 was the riches to be had from the country's mineral resources, including tantalum mines - the biggest in Africa. The war coincided with a surge in the price of the metal caused by the increasing popularity of mobile phones." (New Scientist, 7 April 2001, p 46).

Ever wonder why China is hoarding every gram of our high tech electronic garbage? It's buying up high-tech scrap to extract metals that are key to its developing industries.

One good thing about this recession / depression shakeout-there will be far fewer firms fighting and scrambling over those increasingly precious resources-buying us a few extra years of transition time.

Expert, Consultant and Keynote Speaker on Emerging Smart Technologies, Innovation, Strategic Foresight, Business Development, Lateral Creative Thinking and author of an upcoming book on the Smart Economy "